New Books In East Asian Studies

Oleg Benesch and Ran Zwigenberg’s coauthored Japan's Castles: Citadels of Modernity in War and Peace (Cambridge University Press, 2019) uses the fate of castles after the Meiji coup of 1868 as a case study to explore aspects of Japan’s modern history including historical memory, cultural heritage, and state-civil society and national-regional relations. The authors show that although castles entered the modern era as a symbol of the dark “feudal” past Japan hoped to leave behind, they quickly took on a diverse set of functions and meanings. According to Benesch and Zwigenberg, urban castles in particular—such as those in Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya—were important to the formation of both national and regional identities, playing key symbolic and practical roles as parks, military garrisons, representations of various collective pasts, etc. Especially as society was militarized in the 1930s, castles came to be celebrated as a unification of modernity and tradition, the imperial and local, military and civilian. T